New Variants in the First Part of Dekker's "The Honest Whore"

Abstract

The first part of "The Honest Whore" has an intriguing textual history. Two quarto editions of the play appeared in 1604. Both bear the imprint of Valentine Simmes, yet each appears to have been the work of no less than three different printing shops. What is more, only half of the second quarto (Q2) is a new edition, the rest being made up of 'standing-type' pages preserved from the first quarto (Q1). Interestingly, too, there are many substantial differences between the texts of Q1 and Q2; and these differences occur both in the standing-type pages and in the pages newly composed for Q2. A fairly high proportion of these variants appear to be authoritative, and may well be authorial.